Excellent talks on each of the presenting companies approach the design of their recommendation engines based on the specifics of their markets and users

Recommendation Engines

Thursday, Apr 4, 2013, 6:30 PM

Pandora HQ2101 Webster Street, Suite 1650 Oakland, CA

200 Data Scientists Went

6:30 – 7:00pm Social and Food7:00 – 8:30pm Talks**8:30 – 9:00pm SocialWe’re excited to have three sets of speakers:1. Trulia: Todd Holloway will be giving a talk on Trulia Suggest.2. Rich Relevance: John Jensen and Mike Sherman will be giving their perspectives on recommendation engines.3. Pandora: Eric Bieschke will be giving his perspec…

Say we are the founders of a startup and we just got a big fat check for our A-round funding. The VCs love our idea, and we all know that our app will attract millions of users in no time. This means that from day one we architect for millions of page-views per day…

But wait … do we really need to deploy Hadoop now? Do we need to design for geographical redundancy now? OR should we just build something that’s going to take us through the next 3 months, so that we can focus our energy on customer development and fine-tuning our product features? …

This is a dilemma that most startups face.

Architecting for Scale

The main argument for architecting for scale from the get-go is akin to: “do it right the first time”: we know that lots of users will be using our app, so we want to be ready when they come, and we certainly don’t want the site going down just as our product catches fire.

In addition, for those of us who have been through the pain of a complete rewrite, a rewrite is something we want to avoid at all costs: it is a complex task that is fun under the right circumstances, but very painful under time pressure, e.g. when the current version of the product is breaking under load, and we risk turning away customers, potentially for ever.

On a more modest level, working on big complex problems keeps the engineering team motivated, and working on bleeding or leading edge technology makes it easier to attract talent.

Keeping It Simple

On the other hand, keeping the technology as simple as possible allows the engineering team to be responsive to the product team during the customer development phase. If you believe, as I do, one of Steve Blank’s principles of customer development: “No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers”, then you need to prepare for its corollary namely: “no initial product roadmap survives first contact with customers”. Said differently, attempting to optimize the product for scale until the company has reached clear validation of its business assumptions, and product roadmap, is premature.

On the contrary, the most important qualities that are needed from the Engineering team in the early stages of the company are velocity and adaptability. Velocity, in order to reduce time-to-market, and adaptability, so that the team can rapidly adapt to feedback from “outside the building”.

Spending time designing and implementing a scalable architecture is time that is Not spent responding to customer needs. Similarly, having built a complex system makes it more difficult to adapt to changes.

Worst of all, the investment in early optimization may be all for naught: as the product evolves with customer feedback, so do the scalability constraints.

Case Study: Cloudtalk

I lived through such an example at Cloudtalk. Cloudtalk is designed as a social communication platform with emphasis on voice. The first 2 products “Cloudtalk” and “Let’s Talk” are mobile apps that implement various flavors of group messaging with voice (as well as text and other media). Predicint rapid success, Cloudtalk was designed around the highly scalable noSQL database Cassandra.

I came on board to launch “Just Sayin”, another mobile app that runs on the same backend (very astute design). Just Sayin is targeted to celebrities and allows them to cross-post voice messages to Twitter and Facebook. One of my initial tasks coming on board was to scale the app, and it was suggested that we needed it to move it to Amazon Web Services so that we can scale rapidly as more celebrities (such as Ricky Gervais) adopt our product. However, a quick analysis revealed that unlike the first two products (Let’s Talk and Cloudtalk), Just Sayin’ impact on the database was relatively light, because communications were 1-to-many (e.g. Lady Gaga to her 10M fans). Rather, in order to scale, we first needed a Content Delivery Network (CDN) so that we could feed the millions of fans the messages from their celebrities with low response time.

Furthermore, while Cassandra is a great product, it was somewhat immature at the time (stability, management tools) and consequently slowed down our development. It also took us a long time to train new engineers.

While Cassandra will have been a good choice in the long run, we would have been better served in the formative stages of the company to use more established technology like mySQL. Our velocity in developing new features, and our ability to respond to changes in product strategy would have been significantly faster.

Architecting for Scale is a Process, not an Event

A startup needs to earn the right to design for scale, by first proving that it has found a legitimate market. During this first phase adaptability and velocity are its most important attributes.

This being said, we also need to anticipate that we will need to scale the system at some point. Here is how I like to approach the problem:

First of all, scaling is an on-going process. Even if traffic increases dramatically over a short period of time, not all parts of the system need to be scaled at the same time. Yet, as usage increases, it is likely that any point in time, some part of the system will need to be scaled.

In order to avoid complete rewrites of the system, we need to break it into independent components. This allows us to redesign each component independently, and have different teams work on different problems concurrently. As a consequence, good modularization of the system is much more important early on, than designing for scale

Every release cycle needs to budget time and resources for redesign – including both modularization and scalability. This is just like maintenance on the Golden Gate bridge: the painters are always working; when they finish at one end, they start all over at the other end.

We need to treat our software architecture the same way, and budget maintenance work every release cycle: dollars, time, people. CEOs have to be trained to not only think about the “shiny features” – those that are customer-facing – but also about the “continuous improvements” of the architecture that has to be factored in every release cycle.

We also need to instrument the code to tell us were it is under strain. Unlike the Golden Gate bridge, we can’t always see where it’s breaking, or even rationalize it. Scaling sometimes works in mysterious ways that are not always obvious to predict.

In summary, designing for scale is a high-class problem, on which we only get to work once we have demonstrated true demand for our product. During this first phase, velocity and adaptability are critical, and are better served with well-understood technologies, and a well modularized design. Once our product reaches an adoption phase, then designing for scale is a continuous process that hopefully can be focused on individual modules in turn – guided by proper instrumentation of the code

Quality Assurance does not stop after the software receives the “thumbs up” from the QA team. QA must continue while the product is Live! … because QA is not perfect, and real users only exist on a Production system. We need to be humble and accept that our design, development and quality processes will not catch all the issues. Consequently, we must equip ourselves with tools that will allow us to catch these problems in Production as early as possible … rather than “wait for the phone to ring”

When the product exits QA, it simply means that we have we’ve run out of ideas on how to make the system fail. Unfortunately, this does not imply that the system, once in Production, will not fail. If we are successful and get a high volume of traffic, the simple law of large numbers guarantees that our users will find yet-never-thought-of ways to – unintentionally – make the system fail. These are part of the “unknown unknowns” as Mr. Donald Rumsfeld would say. Deploying the product on the production servers, and handing-off (abdicating?) the responsibility to keeping it up to the Ops team shows wishful thinking or naïveté, or both.

Why QA must continue in Production

There are a few categories of issues that one needs to anticipate in Production:

Functional defects: in essence, bugs that neither developers, nor QA caught – while this is the obvious category that comes to mind, it is far from being the only source of issues

User experience (UX) defects: Product works “as spec’d”, but users either can’t figure how to make the product work, or don’t like it. A typical example is a high abandon rate in a purchasing experience, or any kind of work flow, or a feature that’s never used, a button that’s never clicked.
This is not reserved to new products, by improving the layout of a given page, we may have broken another feature on that same page

Performance issues: while we may have run performance, and load tests, in our QA environments, the real world always offers surprises. Furthermore, if we are lucky enough to have the kind of traffic that Google or Facebook have, there is no other way but to test and fine-tune performance in production
Running tests on non-production systems requires to not only simulate the load of the system, but also to simulate the “weight” of existing data (e.g. in database, file system) as well as longevity to ensure that there is no resource leak (memory, threads, etc)

Operational issues: while all cloud applications are typically clustered for high-availability, there are other sources of failure than equipment failure:

External resources, such as partners, data feeds, can fail, or have bugs of their own, or simply not keep up their response time. Sometimes, the partner updates the API without notification.

User-provided data can be mal-formed, or in an unexpected format, or a new data format can be introduced after the launch of the product

System resources can be consumed at an unexpected rate. Databases are notorious for having non-linear response times based on load: as long as the load is under a given threshold response time is high, but once the load exceeds this threshold response time can deteriorate very rapidly.

A couple of examples:

At my previous company, weeks after the product had been launched, we started receiving occasional complaints that some of the user-created videos were not showing up in their timeline. After (reluctantly) poking around in our log files, we did find out that about 10% of the videos that had been uploaded to our site for the past 2 weeks (but not earlier) were not processed properly. Our transcoder simply failed. Worse, it failed silently. The root cause was a minor modification to the video format introduced by Apple after our product was released. Since this failure was occurring for a small fraction of our users, and we had no “operational instrumentation” in our code, it took us a long time to even become aware of it.

Recently, we launched a product that exchanges data with our partner. Their API is well documented, and we tested our product in their sandbox environment, as well as their production environment. However, after launch, we had reports of occasional failures. It turns out that users on our partner’s site were modifying the data in ways that we did not expect, and causing the API to return error codes that we had never seen. Our code duly logged this problem each time it occurred in our log files … among the thousands of other log events generated every minute

Performing QA on Production Systems

As I mentioned, the Google and Facebook of the world, do a lot (if not most) of their QA on Production systems. Because they run hundreds of thousands of servers, they can use a small subset to run tests will live user data. This is clearly a fantastic option.

Similarly, “A/B comparisons” techniques are typically used in Marketing to compare 2 different user experiences, where the outcome (e.g. a purchase) can be measured. The same technique can be applied in testing, e.g. to validate that a fix of an intermittent bug difficult to reproduce does work.

To detect failures, or QoS degradations, with external causes (e.g. partner API times out a lot)

To monitor resource utilization for each service or application – at a finer grain than provided by Operations monitoring tools which are typically at the server level.

The point is that if a user can’t buy a book on our website because our servers crash under load – this is a bug. While the crash is not due to code written incorrectly, it is due to the absence of code warning us that the system was running out of steam … this is still a bug.

In order to monitor quality in Production, we need to:

Clean up the code that writes to log files: eliminate all logging used for code testing, or statements such as “the code should never reach here”. Instead, write messages that will be meaningful to the poor soul who, a few weeks later, will be poring over megabytes of log files on a Sunday night trying to figure out why the system crashed

Use a log aggregation system, like GrayLog2 (open source), so log files from multiple nodes in the same cluster, as well as nodes from different services can (a) be searched from a console and (b) viewed, time-aligned, on a single page (critical for troubleshooting). GrayLog2 can handle hundreds of millions of log events and terabytes of data.

MEASURE: establish a base line for response time, resources consumption, errors – and trigger alerts when the metrics deviate from the baseline beyond a predetermined threshold

Track that core functions – from a user perspective – complete, and log when, and ideally, why, they fail along with key parameters. E.g.: are users able to upload files to our system, are failures related to file size, time of day, location of user, etc?

Log UX and operationally meaningful events to track how users actually use the system, what features are most used and track them over time. These metrics are critical for the Product Management team

Monitor resource utilization and correlate with usage patterns. Quantify key usage parameters in order to scale the right resources in advance of the demand. For example, as traffic grows, the media server and the database servers may grow at the different rates.

Integrate alarms from application errors into the Ops monitoring tools: e.g. too many “can’t connect” errors should trigger an Ops alert that our partner is down – slow response time on a single server in a cluster may indicate the disk is failing

Quality is not a one-time event, it is an everyday activity, because users change their behaviors, partners change their APIs, systems get full and slow down. What used to work yesterday, may not work today, or no longer be good enough for our customers. As a consequence, the concept the “test driven” development must be extended to the Production systems, and our code must be instrumented to provide metrics that confirm that everything works as desired, and alerts when they don’t. But that’s not sufficient, developers and QA engineers must also take the time to look at the data, not just when a fire drill has been called, but also on a regular basis to understand how the system is being used, and how resources are consumed as the system scales, and apply this knowledge to subsequent releases.

While it may possible to migrate a self-hosted architecture to the cloud with servers in identical configuration, it almost certainly will lead to a sub-optimal architecture in terms of performance, and higher costs, in some cases prohibitively so.

The common objectives for moving to the cloud are:

Ability to scale transparently as the business grows

Reduce costs

Benefit from a word-class IT infrastructure without having to hire the talent

We’ll focus on the first two objectives as the third one is achieved – by nature – the moment you flip the switch to the cloud.

Memory Drives Pricing in the Cloud – not CPU

in the cloud, whether with Amazon EC2 or other vendors, the primary dimension driving pricing is the amount of memory (RAM) available in the server. In addition, CPU allocated is roughly proportional to the amount of RAM.

An Extra Large instance is 8 times bigger than a small instance and costs 8 times as much: 15 GB of RAM – and 8 EC2 Compute Unit and costs: $0.64 per hour On-Demand

In order to get 32 GB of RAM, one needs to move to the High-Memory Double Extra Large Instance aka m2.2xlarge: $0.90 per hour On-Demand

Note that the prices quoted here are for US East (N. Virginia) zone. Prices for US West (Northern California) are more expensive (about 12% based on a few data points I correlated)

Database Servers

Database servers have unique requirements:

They require fast I/O to disk. While Amazon recommends using networked storage, this is typically not practical from a performance perspective.

So database servers also require large local disks: to hold the data

Most databases require a fair amount of memory at least 16 GB. We use Cassandra, and they recommend 32 GB per server.

They hate noisy neighbors (see previous blos). While virtualization technology does a fairly good job at partitioning CPU and RAM, it does a much poorer job at sharing I/O bandwidth. Having another virtual machine running on your database server can kill its performance, even if the neighbor does not do much, it can kill the I/O efficiency. All the tricks that databases use to optimize I/O performance assume that the database is in control of all I/O busses.

As a consequence, one should first of all use a reserved instance – simply because the cost of getting data in and out of the local disks makes it impossible to set-up / tear-down database servers “at will”.

Secondly, one should buy a large enough instance (e.g. m2.4xlarge) so that we are the only tenant on the server. This will cost $7,203 per year – based on Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances pricing, and get us 68.4 GB memory, 4 cores (8 virtual – with Intel Hyper-Threading) and 1.69 TB of local storage.

SSD

As Adrian Cockcroft from Netflix illustrates in his detailed post: Benchmarking High Performance I/O with SSD for Cassandra on AWS, moving to SSD instances for I/O and compute intensive systems can bring significant cost reductions. In his example, he compares a traditional system with 36 x m2.xlarge + 48 x m2.4xlarge instances at a cost of $772,806 (Total 3 Year Heavy Use Cost) – with a 15 x hi1.4xlarge system at a cost of $354,405 – a 54% savings.

As the article illustrates, selecting one versus the other requires careful understanding of the computational profile of the application, and some changes in the application’s architecture

Do I want to use Proprietary Amazon Solutions?

Following the logic that motivates us to move to the Cloud forces to consider using Amazon proprietary solutions: reduce need for sys admin talent, leverage out-of-the-box a scalable high-availability solution, etc

These are excellent products, battle tested by Amazon. However, there are 2 very important considerations to examine:

First, these products are obviously proprietary – making a move to another cloud provider like Rackspace or Joyent, will be take an extensive code rewrite. This may turn out to be impractical.

Secondly, cost can be a (bad) surprise once the application is deployed live. For both RDS or SQS, pricing is driven by data bandwidth AND the number of operations performed using the service – which requires careful analysis to estimate ahead of time. For example, polling every 10 seconds to check whether new data is present in SQS generates 250K operations per month (assuming each check requires only 1 operation). This is fine if this function is performed by a few servers, but would break the bank if it’s performed by 100,000 end-user clients. This adds up to $25,000 ($0.000001 per Request).

How do I best match each of my system’s components with an Amazon instance types>

Can I fine-tune, or even re-write, my algorithms to maximize RAM & CPU utilization? In particular, would I make the same memory vs computation trade-offs? Do I need this hash-table, or can I re-compute the query?

How does my architecture evolve as I scale out? For example, do I need to replicate shared resources – like caches – or will sharding (e.g.) avoid this duplication of data – which will directly impact my cost since pricing is memory driven. An algorithm may work best using a approach favoring memory (and minimizing CPU) when running on a single server but it may be more cost-effective when optimized for memory when scaled out over many servers.

How do new technologies like SSD impact my architecture? As the Netflix article illustrates, the cost impact can be radical, but it required substantial architecture redesign, not just a simple server replacement

In conclusion, moving from a hosted environment (where each server can be configured at will) to the cloud where servers come in pre-determined configurations requires not only an architecture review, but a sophisticated excel spreadsheet to compare the costs of various architectures. This upfront financial modeling is absolutely necessary in order to avoid unpleasant surprises as the business scales up.

The selection of a cloud service provider is a critical decision for any a software service provider. Cost is, naturally, a key driver in this selection. However, predicting the cost of running servers in the cloud is a project in, and of, itself, because the only way to build a reliable model of costs, is to go ahead and deploy our systems with the service providers.

Why is not possible to forecast costs with pen and paper?

The main reason that pricing is so hard to forecast is that our system architecture in the cloud will likely be different from the one currently running in our own datacenter: the server configurations are different, the networking is different, and most likely we want to take advantage of the new features that come “for free” with a deployment in the cloud: higher availability, geographical redundancy, larger scale, etc. We’ll cover this in details in an upcoming post.

Another reason why it is hard to predict costs is that we don’t really know what we are getting:

When one considers the primary attributes of a server: RAM, CPU, storage, I/O (network bandwidth) – only RAM and storage capacity are guaranteed by cloud vendors. Vendors provide varying degrees of specificity about CPU and other key characteristics. Amazon defines EC2 Compute Units: “One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor”. Rackspace’s price sheet categorizes servers by available RAM and disk space (the more RAM, the more disk space). Their FAQ mentions the number of virtual cores each server receives, based on the amount of RAM allocated, but I could not find their definition of a virtual core. GoGrid, or Joyent provide similarly limited information.

As a side note, one needs to be aware that vendors typically refer to “virtual cores” – as opposed to real (physical) cores. A virtual core corresponds to one of the two hyperthreads that run on modern Intel processors since 2002. Conversely, a server with a quad-core Intel Xeon processor runs 8 virtual cores. You can read this 2009 post, plus the comments thread, for more specifics. While the data is dated, the observations are still relevant.

So, there is a lot that we don’t know about the servers on which we will run our system: CPU clock, size of LI, L2 RAM, I/O bus speed, disk spindle rotation speed, network card bandwidth, etc.

Furthermore, performance will vary across servers (since cloud vendors have a diverse park of servers of different age) and thus, each time a new image is deployed, it will land on a random server, with the same nominal specs (RAM, storage), but unknown other physical characteristics (CPU clock, I/O bandwidth, etc).

Another well-documented problem is that of noisy neighbors. While the hypervisors do a fairly good job at controlling allocation of CPU and memory, they are not as effective at controlling the multitude of other factors that affect performance. I/O in particular is very sensitive to contention. While VMware affirms that vSphere solves this problem, most (all ?) cloud vendors use open source hypervisors.

In any event, this problem is systemic and cannot be solved by the hypervisor. For example, we did a lot of research on the best configuration for our Cassandra servers (database for big data). One of the main performance optimizations driving Cassandra’s design is to maximize “append” (rather than update) operations, thus minimizing random movement of the read/write head of the disk, and thus maximizing disk I/O. Unfortunately, all this clever optimization goes out the window if we share the server – and thus the disks – with a noisy neighbor who is performing random read-write operations. I had the chance to discuss this a couple of months ago with members of the Cassandra team at Netflix (one of the largest users of Cassandra and almost 100% deployed on Amazon): they solve the issue by only using m2.4xlarge instances on AWS, which (today) ensures that they are the only tenant on the physical server – and don’t have any noisy neighbor.

Adding all this together makes it pretty clear that vendor comparison on paper is practically fruitless.

Let’s Try It Out

The only practical way to create a realistic budget forecast is to actually deploy systems on the selected cloud vendor(s) and “play” with them. Here are some areas to investigate and characterize, beyond simply validating functionality:

Optimal server configuration for each server role (web, database, search, middle tier, cache, etc). We need to make sure that each server role is adequately served by one of the configurations offered by the vendor. For example, very few offer servers with more than 64 GB of RAM

Performance at scale (since we only pay for the servers we rent, we can run full-scale performance tests for a few hours or days at relatively low cost – e.g. a few hundred dollars) – Netflix tested Cassandra performance, “Over a million writes per second”, on AWS for less than $600 and clusters as large as 288 nodes

End-to-end latency (measured from an end-user perspective) – since latency will be impacted by the physical distribution of the servers

Pricing model

For these tests to be meaningful, one needs to ensure that deployments are realistic: for example, across service zones and regions, if we plan on leveraging these capabilities – as they impact not only performance (due to increased network latency) but also pricing (data transfer charges).

In addition, each test must be run several (10 – 20) times – with fresh deployments – at different times of day – in order to have a representative sample of servers and neighbors.

As important as the technical performance validation, the pricing model must be validated as vendors charge for a variety of services in addition to the lease of the servers: most notably bandwidth for data transfers (e.g. across regions), but also optional services (e.g. AWS Monitoring or Auto-Scaling), as well as per operation fees (e.g. Elastic Block Store). The “per operation” fees can add up to very large amounts, if one is not careful. For example, see the Amazon SimpleDB price calculator – we have to run SimpleDB under real load in order to figure out what numbers to plug in. Overlooking this step can be costly.

Once the technical tests have been completed, and the system configuration validated,

I recommend at least a full billing cycle of simulated operations, in order to obtain an actual bill from the vendor from which we can build our pricing model.

My team and I have spent the past months investigating a deployment to the Cloud with vendors such as Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid … to name a few who provide Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS).

A few conclusions have surfaced:

One needs to clear about one’s motivations to migrate to the Cloud- different motivations will lead to different outcomes, for a given product

It is almost impossible to predict the cost of a cloud-hosted system – without deploying a test system with the selected vendor. As a corollary, precise comparison shopping is almost impossible.

It is almost impossible to design, let alone deploy, your system architecture – without prior hands-on experimentation with your selected vendor. Also, the optimal architecture once deployed in the Cloud is likely to be radically different than one deployed on your own servers.

Some Cloud vendors are moving aggressively up the value chain by offering innovative software technologies on top of their infrastructure. They are thus becoming PaaS (Platform As A Service) vendors. For example, as we commented in a previous post “Is Amazon After Oracle and Microsoft?” Amazon is deploying an array of software technologies – combined with services – that are tailored specifically for the Cloud, and are technically very advanced

We expand each of these points in upcoming posts, starting with the first one today.

The main arguments advanced in favor of a cloud infrastructure are:

Offload the system management responsibilities to the Cloud services provider:
This is more than an economic trade-off: managing systems for high-volume Internet applications is a complex task requiring a broad set of technical skills – where said skills are in permanent evolution. Acquiring all these skills typically requires multiple engineers with varied backgrounds: computer hardware, operating systems, storage, networking, scripting, security, etc. These system administrators have been in high-demand for the past couple of years, demand high compensation, and usually want to work for companies which offer challenging work … namely those with a very large number of systems. As a result, some companies are simply unable to hire the necessary system administration talent in-house, and are forced to move to the Cloud for this single reason.

Leverage best practices established by Cloud vendors.
Cloud services providers have optimized every aspect of running a datacenter. For example, Facebook released the Open Compute project in 2011 for Server and Data Center Technology. RackSpace launched the OpenStack initiative in late 2010, to standardize and share software for Compute (systems management, Storage, Media, Security, as well as Identity and Dashboard. Even managing systems at a hosting provider requires constant tuning of system management tools – whereas a Cloud service provider will take on this burden

Benefit from the economies of scale that the Cloud vendors have created for themselves
Building data centers, finding cheap sources of power, buying and racking computers, creating high-bandwidth links to the Internet, etc. are all activities whose cost drops with volume. However, to me, the impact of price is much smaller than that of pure skills. The aforementioned tasks are becoming more and more complex, to the point where only the largest companies are capable of investing enough to keep up with the state-of-the-art.
In particular, Cloud vendors offer high-availability and recoverability “for free” – namely: free from a technical perspective, but not from a financial one.

Ability to rapidly scale systems up or down according to load
This is one of the main theoretical benefits of the cloud. However, it requires a few architectural components to be in place:
(a) the software architecture has to be truly scalable and free of bottlenecks. For example, traditional N-tier architectures were advertised to be scalable because web servers could be added easily. Unfortunately, the database rapidly becomes the throttling component as the load rises. Scaling up traditional database sub-systems, while maintaining high-availability , is both difficult and expensive.
(b) Tools and algorithms are required to detect variations in load, and to provision/decommission the appropriate servers. This requires a good understanding of how each component of the system contributes to the performance of the whole system. The complexity increases when the performance of components does not behave linearly with load.
(c) Data repositories are slow and expensive to migrate. For example, doubling the size of a Cassandra (noSQL database) cluster is time consuming, uses a lot of bandwidth (for which the vendor may charge) and creates load on the nodes in the cluster.

Ability to create/delete complete system instances (most useful to development and testing)
The Cloud definitely meets this promise for the front-end and business logic layers, but if an instance requires a large amount of data to be populated, you must either pay the time & cost at each deployment or keep the data tier up at all times. This being said, deploying complete instances in the Cloud is still a lot cheaper and faster than doing it in one’s data center, assuming it can be done at all.

The Cloud is cheaper:
This is a simple proposition, with a complex answer. As we’ll examine in the next blog: figuring out pricing in the cloud is a lot more complex than adding the cost of servers.

Appreciating the business and technical drivers that motivate a migration to the Cloud will drive how we approach the next steps in the process: system architecture design, vendor selection, and pricing analysis. As always, different goals will lead to different outcomes.

Amazon is quietly, slowly, but surely becoming a software vendor (in addition to being the largest etailer), with product offerings that compete directly, and in some cases, are broader than the “traditional” software vendors such as Oracle and Microsoft.

For example, a simple review of Amazon Products shows no less than 3 database options Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), SimpleDB and DynamoDB (launched earlier this year), which offers almost infinite scale and reliability.

Amazon also offers an in-memory cache – ElastiCache. You can also use their SIMPLE services: Workflow Service (SWF) – e.g for business processes, Queue Service (SQS) – for asynchronous inter-process communications, a Notification Service (SNS) – for push notifications, as well as email (SES). Amazon calls them all “simple”, yet a number of startups have been built and gone public or been acquired in the past couple decades on the basis of a single of these products: PointCast, Tibco, IronPort, just to name a few.

This is not all … Amazon offers additional services in other product categories: storage, of course, with S3 and EBS (Elastic Block Store), Web traffic monitoring, Identification management, load balancing, application containers, payment services (FPS), billing software (DevPay), backup software, content delivery network, MapReduce … my head spins trying to name all the companies whose business is to provide just a single one of these products.

Furthermore, Amazon is not just packaging mature technologies and slapping a “cloud” label on them. Some of them, like DynamoDB, are truly leading edge. Yet, what is most impressive, and where Amazon’s offering is arguably superior to that of Oracle, Microsoft or the product category competitors, is that Amazon commits to supporting and deploying these products at “Internet scale” – namely as large as they are. This is not only a software “tour-de-force” but also an operational one – as anyone who has tried to run high-availability and high-throughput Oracle or SQL Server clusters can testify.

Given its breadth of products, its ability to operate them at Internet-scale with high-availability, Amazon could become the default software stack: a foundation on which to architect products, displacing the traditional stacks such as: .Net, LAMP, or {mySQL,Oracle}-Java-Apache-JavaScript

The costs of deploying software on the Amazon stack is another story … and the topic of a future post